How Condition Shapes Experience

 When we sit for meditation, we are normally expected to feel calm; we are normally expected to feel that thoughts, or the level of thoughts, has gone down, the frequency of thoughts has gone down.

These are therefore not experiences; they are the consequences of meditation. (…) Technically, it is not an experience; it is a state induced in you by the fact of meditation or, shall we say, by the fact of correct meditation, right meditation properly done. (…)

So we have to distinguish between experiences and conditions or states.

The Interplay Between Condition and Experience

Now the other thing is, when we have these two, there is not only a distinction between them, but there is interplay between them, in the sense that when our condition is gross (…) the grossness itself conditions the experience. (…)

So, to know what is an experience, to know whether it’s really an experience, we have to be aware of our condition and also to be alert to note what is going on. (…)

I would say that without that condition you couldn’t have that experience. So in spirituality, I would hazard the suggestion that every experience, to be real, must be backed by a condition of existence which is real, a state of existence which is real. (…)

Condition Comes First

So the condition comes first, the experience comes subsequently. Then I have no difficulty in distinguishing the condition and the experience, because they are part of the same thing.

I see a thing because the thing exists. If the thing didn’t exist and I saw it, it would be a fantasy, it would be a hallucination. (…)

You must be able to evaluate what you are seeing and to know whether it is reality, or a chimera of your imagination. (…) It is necessary to evaluate through the senses and to come through that into association with the reality which is trying to peep through these experiences into us.

In that sense, an experience is only like, you know, the tentative touch of reality, intruding into our consciousness, waiting for us to see the reality behind it. (…)

So when you sit in meditation please try to be discriminative.

— P. Rajagopalachari, Heart to Heart, Volume 1, pp. 88–104

Why People Have Different Experiences

Because when you give a sitting to fifteen people, there is always a tacit assumption that because we are together and one person is giving us the sitting, we shall all experience the same thing.

This is not true, not in spirituality. Because you each have an experience depending on your condition at that moment.

Like if one man is hungry and the other man is already well fed, you give them something to eat, the hungry man appreciates it much more than the full man. He says, “Oh, it’s okay.”

If that is the case with mere physical food, what about the spiritual sustenance?

— P. Rajagopalachari, A Preceptor’s Guide, Volume 2, p. 61

Observing Without Interpretation

Our eyes should be like a camera lens. The camera takes a photograph, of anything, you see, it may be a lion, it may be a beautiful girl, it may be a piece of rock.

But it does not make any subjective interpretation. It does not say, “this is beautiful, this is hard, this is ugly”; it registers. An instrument is supposed to register.

Then we interpret. By interpreting we get into trouble.

— P. Rajagopalachari, Fruit of the Tree, p. 53